Russian dolls # 2. Five minutes are worth priceless treasures

Those who frequent my blog know that I consider The Idiot to be Dostoyevsky's most moving novel. The extraordinary personality of the main hero, Prince Mychkin, cannot leave anyone indifferent. His "idiocy" is a kind of divine wisdom wrapped in a remarkable clumsiness and a disarming humility. Several "stories within a story", those "Russian dolls" that I wrote about recently, shed light on the deep springs of this quasi-Christic figure.

Let us begin with a double narrative in which Mychkin speaks about the feelings that a person sentenced to death experiences in his last moments. The first one can be found at the beginning of the novel (Book 1, II). Mychkin has just arrived in St. Petersburg. He is waiting in the lobby of the home of General Epantchine, whose wife is a distant relative of the prince. He enters into conversation with the servant who opened the door. They begin talking about the death penalty, which had been abolished in Russia. But the prince has come from abroad. The servant asks: “Does it exist over there?’ – ‘Yes, I saw an execution in France, at Lyons’ (…) – ‘By going to the gallows?” – ‘No, they always cut off people’s heads in France.’ – ‘What did the fellow do? yell?’ – ‘What do you think? It’s lasts a split second. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery - they call the thing a guillotine - it falls with fearful force and weight - the head springs off so quickly that you can’t wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the scaffold - that’s the fearful part of the business.”^(*)

In the rest of the narrative Mychkin's attention is fully focused on what the condemned person experiences and feels. “…when that man stepped upon the scaffold he cried - he did indeed, - he was as white as a bit of paper. Isn’t it a dreadful idea that he should have cried…” The servant replies: “Well, in any case it is a good thing that there’s no pain when the poor fellow’s head flies off”. But Mychkin goes on: “you made that remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? (…) Now with the rack and tortures and so on - you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all - but the certain knowledge that in an hour,- then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now - this very instant - your soul must quit your body (…) and that this is certain, certain! That’s the point – the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head – then - that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.”

Then, Mychkin does not hesitate to assert that: “I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. (…) The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape until the very moment of his death (…) But in the case of an execution, that last hope - having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die, is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place!”

Moments later, Mychkin is in the Epantchines’ parlor. His relative, Elizaveta Prokofievna, and especially her three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaide and Aglaïa, badger him with questions. Mychkin begins to speak about a man who “had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted” (Book 1, V). One should remember that Dostoevsky himself, sentenced to death for his participation, albeit minor, in the revolutionary circle of Mikhail Petrachevsky, was the object of a mock execution. It was announced that their sentence had been commuted while the firing squad was already taking aim. An event that would make an indelible impression on him.

Now Mychkin, continuing his narrative, emphasizes the terrible trial experienced by the man during the minutes that elapsed between the proclamation of the verdict and the announcement of the commutation. “Twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die (…) He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience (...) He seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions - one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around (…) He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? (…) The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, ‘What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!’ He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it.”

The prince interrupts his narrative and Alexandra, the elder daughter, interjects: “You probably wish to deduce (…) that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that ‘eternity of days.’ What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes? – Oh no, he didn’t! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute...”

Then the conversation continues. Although Adelaide asks him to suggest a subject for a painting, Mychkin resumes the account of the execution by guillotine, insisting even more on what is going on in the mind of the condemned: “… the brain is especially active, and works incessantly - probably hard, hard, hard - like an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head - all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts, very likely! - like this, for instance: ‘That man is looking at me, and he has a wart on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his buttons, and the lowest one is all rusty!’ And meanwhile he notices and remembers everything. There is one point that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else dances and turns about; and because of this point he cannot faint, and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows - that’s the point, he knows that he is just now about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head.”

What is Dostoevsky trying to tell us with these "stories in a story"? First of all, and undoubtedly, he is saying something to us about himself and the terrible experience which he had to endure himself. But also, and above all, he is shedding light on the personality of his hero, Prince Mychkin, a man capable of true and profound compassion, a man vulnerable to the extreme, incapable of condemning and ready to give his life to save the one who is lost, a man of reconciliation and forgiveness. In short, a man in the image of Christ.

Another time I will tell about other "stories in a story" that abound in The Idiot, but that's enough for now.

Fiodor

(*) All the quotations from The Idiot are taken from the English translation of Eva Martin, eBook on www.gutenberg.org

Dostoevsky peering into hearts # 2 - Ardalion Alexandrovitch Ivolgin

Dostoevsky in 1847

I have been absent from the “blogosphere” longer than expected. So, it is time to return to my promise to present some special figures from Dostoevsky’s universe: the marginalized, the humiliated, the rejected, the crazy, the sick.

The man I would like to talk about today is a character in The Idiot, a novel for which I have a special affection. General Ivolgin, to describe him in a few words, is a pathetic old man, mythomaniac, quite a drinker, but in whose heart lies goodness, and that a painful awareness of his decay crosses his mind, at times. The gentle Kolya, his youngest son, torn between shame and tenderness inspired by his father, speaks to Prince Myshkin: “Look at my father, the general! See what he is, and yet, I assure you, he is an honest man! Only... he drinks too much, and his morals are not all we could desire. Yes, that's true! I pity him, to tell the truth, but I dare not say so, because everybody would laugh at me - but I do pity him!”(*). Myshkin, the “idiot”, has quickly realized what kind of man is the general, and he shows patience, respect and kindness towards him.

The reader discovers general Ivolgin’s mythomania through several episodes, some of which generate hilarity mixed with bad conscience. But the narrator – Dostoevsky does not identify him and does not clearly identify himself with him – gives an interesting portrait of the general, in which the members of his family, especially his wife, Nina Alexandrovna, are also mentionned. “... He had (...) experienced fits of sudden fury, but not very often, because he was really a man of peaceful and kindly disposition. He had tried hundreds of times to overcome the dissolute habits which he had contracted of late years. He would suddenly remember that he was “a father”, would be reconciled with his wife, and shed genuine tears. His feeling for Nina Alexandrovna amounted almost to adoration; she had pardoned so much in silence, and loved him still in spite of the state of degradation into which he had fallen. But the general's struggles with his own weakness never lasted very long. He was, in his way, an impetuous man, and a quiet life of repentance in the bosom of his family soon became insupportable to him. In the end he rebelled, and flew into rages which he regretted, perhaps, even as he gave way to them, but which were beyond his control. He picked quarrels with everyone, began to hold forth eloquently, exacted unlimited respect, and at last disappeared from the house, and sometimes did not return for a long time.”

From his first meeting with Myshkin, Ivolgin flounders in the ridiculous excesses of his imagination. As he just moved into his new home, a room rented to the general’s wife, the prince comes face to face with the general, who introduces himself: “General Ivolgin, retired and miserable...” The general asks the prince’s Christian and genreric names. As the prince answers: “Lev Nicolaevitch”, he immediately declares that he is a childhood friend of his father:

“– So, so, the son of my old, I may say my childhood's friend, Nicolai Petrovitch.

– My father's name was Nicolai Lvovitch.

– Lvovitch, repeated the general without the slightest haste, and with perfect confidence, just as though he had not committed himself the least in the world, but merely made a little slip of the tongue. He sat down, and taking the prince's hand, drew him to a seat next to himself.

– I carried you in my arms as a baby, he observed.”

Gradually, the general becomes completely immoderate. As Myshkin tells him that his father died some years ago, Ivolgin questions him about his mother:

“– Your mother...

– She died a few months later, from a cold, said the prince.

– Oh, not a cold – believe an old man – not from a cold, but from grief for her prince. Oh! your mother, your mother! heigh-ho! Youth! youth! Your father and I, old friends as we were, nearly murdered each other for her sake.

The prince began to be a little incredulous.

– I was passionately in love with her when she was engaged, engaged to my friend.”

The general continues in the same vein, when Kolya, sent by his mother, comes and asks him. In the presence of his wife and the prince, Ivolgin goes on worse and worse, inventing a new episode that Myshkin’s father would have witnessed.

“– It did not occur, it's a mistake! said Nina Alexandrovna quickly, looking, at the prince rather anxiously. Mon mari se trompe, she added, speaking in French.

– My dear, se trompe is easily said. Do you remember any case at all like it?”

When the general was gone, his wife spoke to the prince: 

“– You will have to excuse very much in my husband (...), but he will not disturb you often (...) Everyone has his little peculiarities, you know, and some people perhaps have more than those who are most pointed at and laughed at. One thing I must beg of you: if my husband applies to you for payment for board and lodging, tell him that you have already paid me...”

The general, indeed, as the habit of engaging in small trickery, or even petty theft, to pay for his drink.

A few pages later, the general turns ridicule again. He emphatically tells an incident that happened to him during a trip by rail. But a member of the audience declares that she read “absolutely the same story” in a newspaper a few days ago!

“The general blushed dreadfully; Kolia blushed too (...) – I assure you, said the general, that exactly the same thing happened to myself!”

But the climax of the general’s mythomania is reached when he claims, in a passionate speech, having been close to Napoleon, in Moscow, during the Russian campaign. No less than a dozen pages are devoted to this unforgettable episode. At the turn of another fanciful story, the general suggests he was Napoleon’s pageboy.

Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) The red boy

“– Why, did you say... began the prince, and paused in confusion. The general gazed at his host disdainfully. – Oh, go on, he said, finish your sentence, by all means. Say how odd it appears to you that a man fallen to such a depth of humiliation as I, can ever have been the actual eye-witness of great events.”

And the general gets embarked on a story more and more incredible, that the prince listens politely and even, when it is not too improbable, he kindly approves:

“– All this is most interesting, said the prince, very softly, if it really was so... that is, I mean... he hastened to correct himself.

– Oh, my dear prince, cried the general, who was now so intoxicated with his own narrative that he probably could not have pulled up at the most patent indiscretion...”

And this is what happens: the general tells how, at night, witness of tears of the emperor, he advised him to write a letter to Josephine, and how, when Napoleon left Moscow, he asked him to write something in the album of his little sister, aged three:

“– ... and he wrote in the album: ‘Ne mentez jamais! Napoléon, votre ami sincère.’ [Do never lie! Napoleon, your sincere friend]. Such advice, and at such a moment, you must allow, prince, was...

– Yes, quite so; very remarkable.”

Ivolgin suddenly stops:

“– How I have kept you, prince! It is really most unpardonable of me.The general rose.

“– Oh, not in the least, said the prince. On the contrary, I have been so much interested, I'm really very much obliged to you.

“– Prince, said the general, pressing his hand, and looking at him with flashing eyes, and an expression as though he were under the influence of a sudden thought which had come upon him with stunning force. Prince, you are so kind, so simple-minded, that sometimes I really feel sorry for you! I gaze at you with a feeling of real affection. Oh, Heaven bless you! May your life blossom and fructify in love. Mine is over. Forgive me, forgive me!”

The next day, in complete crisis, the general has left the house and wanders in the street. Kolya tries to reason with him, but the old man is somewhere else:

“– ‘Where is my youth, where is my golden youth?’ Who was it said that, Kolia?

– It was Gogol, in Dead Souls, father, cried Colia, glancing at him in some alarm.”

The general still evokes the past, the suffering he inflicted on his family. Kolya again:

“– Look here, dear old father, come back home! Let's go back to mother(...) Why are you crying, father? Poor Kolia cried himself, and kissed the old man's hands.

– You kiss my hands, mine?

– Yes, yes, yours, yours! What is there to surprise anyone in that? Come, come, you mustn't go on like this, crying in the middle of the road; and you a general too, a military man! Come, let's go back.”

But the general continues to speak in a strange way. On several occasions, probably inhabited by his Napoleonic story, he says: “the King of Rome.” Exhausted, he sits on the steps of a porch and pulls Kolya towards him:

“– Bend down, bend down your ear. I'll tell you all... disgrace... bend down, I'll tell you in your ear.

– What are you dreaming of? said poor, frightened Kolia, stooping down towards the old man, all the same.

– Le roi de Rome, whispered the general, trembling all over.

– What? What do you mean? What roi de Rome?

– I... I..., the general continued to whisper, clinging more and more tightly to the boy's shoulder. I... wish... Kolia broke loose, seized his father by the shoulders, and stared into his eyes with frenzied gaze. The old man had grown livid... his lips were shaking, convulsions were passing over his features. Suddenly he leant over and began to sink slowly into Kolia's arms.

– He's got a stroke! cried Colia, loudly, realizing what was the matter at last.”

And a few days later, the general passes over

The tender and painful affection that Kolya feels for his father, as well as the embarrassed and worried respect showed towards him by the prince, clearly show that kindness, generosity and ideal are hidden behind the lunacy and the eccentricities of the old man. After all, there is in him something of the child, the child he remained because he could not accommodate the adult world and its meanness.

Children love stories – to listen or to tell them –, filling up their memory and their heart of dreams, beauty and life. Dostoevsky wrote somewhere that drunkards are, of all people, “the nicest.” Maybe that the form of madness as evidenced by general Ivolgin belongs also to “nice” persons, dreamers, people wounded by life who think they are Napoleon...

Before pointing the finger or condemning the Ivolgins, the gentle mythomaniacs, let us look at our masks, our hypocrisy, our dishonest compromises with “dirty things” that give the appearance of “decent”.

Fiodor

   

(*) All quotations are from the English version of The Idiot, translated by Eva Martin, e-book on www.gutenberg.org

Myshkin prize 2012

You may have read in the media that a «Myshkin Prize» (founded by a group of intellectuals among whom Peter Sloterdijk) was awarded, in 2012, to a certain Stéphane Hessel, the author – adulated as a saint – of a pamphlet called «Indignez-vous» (Be indignant).

Due to my old frienship with Prince Myshkin, I had the pleasure to receive a copy of a letter of protest sent to the jury of the Prize by the father of The Idiot, the great Fiodor Dostoevsky himself. Here it is :

«To the members of the jury of the Myshkin Prize,

On behalf of Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, I want you to know that I totally disapprove the awarding of a prize bearing his name – by what right?? – To Mr. Hessel. The latter, whose old age however deserves respect, has no other merit than having published twenty or so pages, trite and digestible enough to win tens of thousands of suckers, too happy to buy themselves a cheap good conscience.

Be assured of my indignation.

Fiodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky»

You will easily understand how eagerly I consider it my duty to inform you of this letter.

Fiodor (the other one)